Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 30
By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:
Restoration of Azerbaijan's full membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) will be considered in the near future, said Shahmar Movsumov, executive director of Azerbaijan's State Oil Fund (SOFAZ).
He made the remarks Apr. 30 at the 18th General Assembly of the Coalition for Improving Transparency in Extractive Industries in Baku.
Movsumov said a number of conditions for restoration of Azerbaijan's status as a full member have already been implemented and a number of other issues will be resolved in the near future.
The EITI International Secretariat's Policy and Regional Director Dyveke Rogan, in turn, said the evaluation of Azerbaijan's accounting will begin in June.
"We were to start the evaluation this month, but it was delayed for some reasons," noted Rogan, adding that the evaluation process was delayed not only for Azerbaijan, but also for other countries.
EITI is a special multilateral and voluntary initiative for improving transparency in the oil, gas and mining sectors. Azerbaijan joined the EITI in 2003.
In 2015, EITI lowered the status of Azerbaijan in this structure. The decision was made at the 29th meeting in Brazzaville held April 14-15 after the discussions on an evaluation report on Azerbaijan.
Following the discussions, the EITI Board decided to lower the membership of Azerbaijan to the candidate status.
